In 1939, the Nazis were rumored to be developing an atomic bomb. The United States initiated its own program under the Army Corps of Engineers in June 1942. America needed to build an atomic weapon before Germany or Japan did. General Leslie R. Groves, Deputy Chief of Construction of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, was appointed to direct this top-secret project. The Manhattan Project was the project to develop the first nuclear weapon (atomic bomb) during World War II by the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada. Formally designated as the Manhattan Engineer District (MED), it refers specifically to the period of the project from 1941–1946 under the control of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, under the administration of General Leslie R. Groves. The scientific research was directed by American physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer.The project succeeded in developing and detonating three nuclear weapons in 1945: a test detonation of a plutonium implosion bomb on July 16 (the Trinity test) near Alamogordo, New Mexico An enriched uranium bomb code-named "Little Boy" on August 6 over Hiroshima, Japan; and a second plutonium bomb, code-named "Fat Man" on August 9 over Nagasaki, Japan. Many people assume that the same holds true for the Manhattan Project, in which thousands of experts gathered in the mountains of New Mexico to make the world’s first atom bomb. Robert S Norris, a historian of the atomic age, wants to shatter that myth. In ‘The Manhattan Project’, published last month, Norris writes about the Manhattan Project’s Manhattan locations. He says the borough had at least 10 sites, all but one still standing. They include warehouses that held uranium, laboratories that split the atom, and the project’s first headquarters — a skyscraper hidden in plain sight right across from City Hall. “It was super secret,” Norris said. “At least 5,000 people were coming and going to work, knowing only enough to get the job done.” Manhattan was central, according to Norris, because it had everything: lots of military units, piers for the import of precious ores, top physicists who had fled Europe and ranks of workers eager to aid the war effort. It even had spies who managed to steal some of the project’s top secrets. “The story is so rich,” Norris enthused. “There’s layer upon layer of good stuff, interesting characters.” Still, more than six decades after the project’s start, the Manhattan side of the atom bomb story seems to be a well-preserved secret. (Norris is also the author of a biography of Gen Leslie R Groves, the project’s military leader.) Norris recently visited Manhattan at the request of ‘The New York Times’ for a daylong tour of the Manhattan Project’s roots. Only one site he visited displayed a public sign noting its role in the epochal events. And most people who encountered his entourage knew little or nothing of the atomic labors in Manhattan. So how did the Manhattan Project get its name, and why was Manhattan chosen as its first headquarters? Norris said the answer lay at our next stop, 270 Broadway. There, at Chambers Street, on the corner, we found a nondescript building overlooking City Hall Park.A month after the first bomb was tested; two nuclear weapons were exploded over Japan, at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There were many reasons for this. The official reason is that it would immediately end the war, thus saving the lives of thousands of American servicemen. Immediate deaths from the bomb are estimated to be about 100,000. This figure is astounding. However, it is comparable to the estimated number of casualties that would have resulted from a Allied invasion of the Japanese home islands. However, the choice to drop the bombs on Japan is very controversial and there are many people that feel they were unnecessary, and that Japan would have surrendered anyway.
For more details on First Nuclear Bomb visit http://www.halfvalue.com/ and http://www.halfvalue.co.uk/For more information on books visit http://www.lookbookstores.com/
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Vajayjay, What Did You Call It?
THIS is the story of how a silly-sounding word reached the ear of a powerful television producer, and in only seconds of air time, expanded the vocabularies — for better or worse — of legions of women. It began on Feb. 12, 2006, when viewers of the ABC series “Grey’s Anatomy” heard the character Miranda Bailey, a pregnant doctor who had gone into labor, admonish a male intern, “Stop looking at my vajayjay.”
The line sprang from an executive producer’s need to mollify standards and practices executives who wanted the script to include fewer mentions of the word vagina.The scene, however, had the unintended effect of catapulting vajayjay (also written va-jay-jay) into mainstream speech. Fans of “Grey’s Anatomy” expressed their approval of the word on message boards and blogs.The show’s most noted fan, Oprah Winfrey, began using it on her show, effectively legitimizing it for some 46 million American viewers each week. “I think vajayjay is a nice word, don’t you?” she asked her audience. Vajayjay found its way into electronic dictionaries like Urban Dictionary, Word Spy and Merriam-Webster’s Open Dictionary. It was uttered on the television series “30 Rock.” It was used on the Web site of “The Tyra Banks Show.” Jimmy Kimmel said it in a monologue. It has appeared in the Web publications Salon and the Huffington Post and on the blog Wonkette.
“There was a need for a pet name,” said Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley, and the chairman of the usage panel for the American Heritage Dictionary, “a name that women can use in a familiar way among themselves.” Acceptance of the word, however, also reignites an old argument, one most forcefully made by Eve Ensler in “The Vagina Monologues.” Over a decade ago, Ms. Ensler wrote that “what we don’t say becomes a secret, and secrets often create shame and fear and myths.” Vagina, her widely performed series of monologues declared, is too often an “invisible word,” one “that stirs up anxiety, awkwardness, contempt and disgust.”
Dr. Carol A. Livoti, a Manhattan obstetrician and gynecologist and an author of “Vaginas: An Owner’s Manual” (Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2004), said vajayjay and other euphemisms and slang offend her and can render women incapable of explaining their symptoms to health professionals. “I think it’s terrible,” Dr. Livoti said. “It’s time to start calling anatomical organs by their anatomical name. We should be proud of our bodies.” “It seems like a step backward,” she added.
Another view was offered by John H. McWhorter, a linguist and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, who pointed out that the women associated with introducing the word — Ms. Winfrey, the Miranda Bailey character on “Grey’s Anatomy” — are middle-age African-Americans. Ms. Rhimes asked the show’s writers for alternative words, but it was an assistant, Blythe Robe, who volunteered her own alias: vajayjay. “As in ‘I’m off to the gynie to see about my vajayjay,’” Ms. Rhimes said.
David Fiske, an F.C.C. spokesman, said that the agency does not penalize networks for the number of times the words vagina and penis are spoken. But if the words are used in a graphic and explicit description of “sexual or excretory organs or activities,” he said, it might contribute to a finding of indecency. “Context is a critical factor,” he said. Ms. Rhimes said it is an “absolute surprise” how a word she introduced to appease her network’s guardians of taste has taken off.
K. P. Anderson and Edward Boyd, executive producers of “The Soup,” think Ms. Winfrey is well aware she is promoting the word, based on the sassy way she utters it and how she looks into the camera when doing so. (Ms. Winfrey declined to be interviewed for this article.) “It’s her ‘truthiness,’ ” Mr. Anderson said. “She’ll get it in the dictionary if it kills us.”Some people are not waiting for that formality. “Now, vajayjay’s just a given for me,” Ms. Rhimes said. “It’s a word I use, a word my female friends use, a word I’ve heard women in the grocery store use. I don’t even think about where it came from anymore. It doesn’t belong to me or anyone at the show. It belongs to all women.”
For more details on Vajayjay visit http://www.halfvalue.com/ and http://www.halfvalue.co.uk/For more information on books visit http://www.lookbookstores.com/
The line sprang from an executive producer’s need to mollify standards and practices executives who wanted the script to include fewer mentions of the word vagina.The scene, however, had the unintended effect of catapulting vajayjay (also written va-jay-jay) into mainstream speech. Fans of “Grey’s Anatomy” expressed their approval of the word on message boards and blogs.The show’s most noted fan, Oprah Winfrey, began using it on her show, effectively legitimizing it for some 46 million American viewers each week. “I think vajayjay is a nice word, don’t you?” she asked her audience. Vajayjay found its way into electronic dictionaries like Urban Dictionary, Word Spy and Merriam-Webster’s Open Dictionary. It was uttered on the television series “30 Rock.” It was used on the Web site of “The Tyra Banks Show.” Jimmy Kimmel said it in a monologue. It has appeared in the Web publications Salon and the Huffington Post and on the blog Wonkette.
“There was a need for a pet name,” said Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley, and the chairman of the usage panel for the American Heritage Dictionary, “a name that women can use in a familiar way among themselves.” Acceptance of the word, however, also reignites an old argument, one most forcefully made by Eve Ensler in “The Vagina Monologues.” Over a decade ago, Ms. Ensler wrote that “what we don’t say becomes a secret, and secrets often create shame and fear and myths.” Vagina, her widely performed series of monologues declared, is too often an “invisible word,” one “that stirs up anxiety, awkwardness, contempt and disgust.”
Dr. Carol A. Livoti, a Manhattan obstetrician and gynecologist and an author of “Vaginas: An Owner’s Manual” (Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2004), said vajayjay and other euphemisms and slang offend her and can render women incapable of explaining their symptoms to health professionals. “I think it’s terrible,” Dr. Livoti said. “It’s time to start calling anatomical organs by their anatomical name. We should be proud of our bodies.” “It seems like a step backward,” she added.
Another view was offered by John H. McWhorter, a linguist and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, who pointed out that the women associated with introducing the word — Ms. Winfrey, the Miranda Bailey character on “Grey’s Anatomy” — are middle-age African-Americans. Ms. Rhimes asked the show’s writers for alternative words, but it was an assistant, Blythe Robe, who volunteered her own alias: vajayjay. “As in ‘I’m off to the gynie to see about my vajayjay,’” Ms. Rhimes said.
David Fiske, an F.C.C. spokesman, said that the agency does not penalize networks for the number of times the words vagina and penis are spoken. But if the words are used in a graphic and explicit description of “sexual or excretory organs or activities,” he said, it might contribute to a finding of indecency. “Context is a critical factor,” he said. Ms. Rhimes said it is an “absolute surprise” how a word she introduced to appease her network’s guardians of taste has taken off.
K. P. Anderson and Edward Boyd, executive producers of “The Soup,” think Ms. Winfrey is well aware she is promoting the word, based on the sassy way she utters it and how she looks into the camera when doing so. (Ms. Winfrey declined to be interviewed for this article.) “It’s her ‘truthiness,’ ” Mr. Anderson said. “She’ll get it in the dictionary if it kills us.”Some people are not waiting for that formality. “Now, vajayjay’s just a given for me,” Ms. Rhimes said. “It’s a word I use, a word my female friends use, a word I’ve heard women in the grocery store use. I don’t even think about where it came from anymore. It doesn’t belong to me or anyone at the show. It belongs to all women.”
For more details on Vajayjay visit http://www.halfvalue.com/ and http://www.halfvalue.co.uk/For more information on books visit http://www.lookbookstores.com/
Sunday, July 8, 2007
Nasa will send ‘icebreaker’ to Mars in hunt for life
Aspace probe designed to look for signs of life in the oceans that once covered Mars will be unveiled by Nasa scientists this week.
The Phoenix Mars Lander will be sent to the icy wastelands near the red planet’s north polar ice cap. It will be launched next month and is expected to reach the planet in May.
When the probe lands its task will be to dig deep into the soil, scoop out chunks of ice and analyze them for signs of past or present life forms. The landing site has been chosen as the most likely point to find buried ice that once formed part of the planet’s oceans.
“The arctic plains are the right place for the next step in Mars exploration and this is the right time to go there,” said Leslie Tamppari, Phoenix project scientist at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “We expect to touch Martian ice for the first time.”
Mars is now a cold desert planet with the thinnest of atmospheres and no water on the surface. However, previous missions have shown that there are large amounts of ice below the planet’s crust in the northern arctic plains.
Data from previous missions suggest that billions of years ago water flowed through canyons and formed large shallow seas. Some of these may have still been in existence 100,000 years ago.
The search for water is more than scientific. Nasa’s long-term goal is to send a human to Mars and a manned mission would be easier if the crew was guaranteed a source of water on arrival.
The Phoenix probe is one of the largest that Nasa has sent to Mars and will require descent thrusters to control the landing. A Nasa spokesman said that the probe would use a high-definition camera to gather geological data on the area around the landing site as the craft descended.
Many of the scientific instruments for Phoenix were built or designed for the 2001 Mars Surveyor Lander, which was mothballed, and the ill-fated Mars Polar Lander in 1999, which is thought to have crashed on landing.
“This site wouldn’t be my first choice as a place for looking for life,” said Colin Pillinger, professor of planetary sciences at the Open University, who oversaw Britain’s ill-fated Beagle mission that was lost on the red planet in 2003.
“The temperature is going to be very low in a permanent polar region, which reduces the chances of finding life. If you were a microbiologist you wouldn’t be keen to send a probe to the Martian north pole but it is new and that makes it exciting.”
Nasa is also this week due to launch its Dawn probe, which will penetrate deep into the asteroid belt that lies between Mars and Jupiter. It will investigate two of the largest asteroids, thought to be part of the “rubble” left over from the formation of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago.
For more details on Nasa icebreaker visit www.halfvalue.com and www.halfvalue.co.uk
For more information on books visit www.Lookbookstores.com
The Phoenix Mars Lander will be sent to the icy wastelands near the red planet’s north polar ice cap. It will be launched next month and is expected to reach the planet in May.
When the probe lands its task will be to dig deep into the soil, scoop out chunks of ice and analyze them for signs of past or present life forms. The landing site has been chosen as the most likely point to find buried ice that once formed part of the planet’s oceans.
“The arctic plains are the right place for the next step in Mars exploration and this is the right time to go there,” said Leslie Tamppari, Phoenix project scientist at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “We expect to touch Martian ice for the first time.”
Mars is now a cold desert planet with the thinnest of atmospheres and no water on the surface. However, previous missions have shown that there are large amounts of ice below the planet’s crust in the northern arctic plains.
Data from previous missions suggest that billions of years ago water flowed through canyons and formed large shallow seas. Some of these may have still been in existence 100,000 years ago.
The search for water is more than scientific. Nasa’s long-term goal is to send a human to Mars and a manned mission would be easier if the crew was guaranteed a source of water on arrival.
The Phoenix probe is one of the largest that Nasa has sent to Mars and will require descent thrusters to control the landing. A Nasa spokesman said that the probe would use a high-definition camera to gather geological data on the area around the landing site as the craft descended.
Many of the scientific instruments for Phoenix were built or designed for the 2001 Mars Surveyor Lander, which was mothballed, and the ill-fated Mars Polar Lander in 1999, which is thought to have crashed on landing.
“This site wouldn’t be my first choice as a place for looking for life,” said Colin Pillinger, professor of planetary sciences at the Open University, who oversaw Britain’s ill-fated Beagle mission that was lost on the red planet in 2003.
“The temperature is going to be very low in a permanent polar region, which reduces the chances of finding life. If you were a microbiologist you wouldn’t be keen to send a probe to the Martian north pole but it is new and that makes it exciting.”
Nasa is also this week due to launch its Dawn probe, which will penetrate deep into the asteroid belt that lies between Mars and Jupiter. It will investigate two of the largest asteroids, thought to be part of the “rubble” left over from the formation of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago.
For more details on Nasa icebreaker visit www.halfvalue.com and www.halfvalue.co.uk
For more information on books visit www.Lookbookstores.com
Thursday, June 28, 2007
Pluto’s not even the biggest dwarf
Poor Pluto has been demoted again. Calculations published to show that astronomers no longer deem Pluto to be even the largest of our solar system’s so-called dwarf planets — it is smaller than recently discovered dwarf planet Eris.
Brown and Emily Schaller of the California Institute of Technology used data collected from the Hubble Space Telescope and the Keck Observatory in Hawaii to determine for the first time that Eris had a greater mass than Pluto.
Eris, discovered in 2005 and named for an ancient Greek goddess of strife and discord, is 27% more massive than Pluto, they found. Eris is about half the size of Earth’s moon, Brown said.
Pluto, named for the ancient Greek god of the underworld, was discovered in 1930. It was considered our solar system’s ninth planet until August 2006, when the International Astronomical Union declared it a dwarf planet, a term referring to lesser, round solar system bodies orbiting the sun, mostly in an outer region called the Kuiper belt.
“I don’t think we’re picking on Pluto,” Brown, a professor of planetary astronomy who helped provoke the demotion of Pluto, said in a telephone interview.
“It’s just the truth. It (Eris) just is more massive than Pluto. It’s just the way it is,” Brown said.
The findings were published in the journal Science. Scientists previously had figured that Eris’s diameter was bigger than Pluto’s but did not know about its mass. Like Pluto, Eris is unlikely to become a holiday destination. Both inhabit a remote and frigid region of the solar system. The new data indicated Eris likely is composed of ice and rock, very similar to Pluto. “It is covered in an almost perfectly uniform white frost. So it looks just like a white billiard ball out there,” Brown said.
Pluto and Eris both follow elliptical rather than circular orbits as they journey around the Sun. Eris’s orbit is highly elongated and takes 560 years. It ventures anywhere from 3.5 billion miles to 10 billion miles from Earth, Brown said.
Pluto, whose 250-year orbit on occasion brings it inside the orbit of the outermost planet Neptune, journeys as far as 5 billion miles from Earth, Brown said.
Eris, which has a small moon, has a diameter of 1,500 miles, just bigger than Pluto’s 1,400 miles. Brown said there are roughly 50 known objects in the solar system that can be classified as dwarf planets, including some close in size to Eris and Pluto. Brown said Pluto should be getting accustomed to second place.
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Brown and Emily Schaller of the California Institute of Technology used data collected from the Hubble Space Telescope and the Keck Observatory in Hawaii to determine for the first time that Eris had a greater mass than Pluto.
Eris, discovered in 2005 and named for an ancient Greek goddess of strife and discord, is 27% more massive than Pluto, they found. Eris is about half the size of Earth’s moon, Brown said.
Pluto, named for the ancient Greek god of the underworld, was discovered in 1930. It was considered our solar system’s ninth planet until August 2006, when the International Astronomical Union declared it a dwarf planet, a term referring to lesser, round solar system bodies orbiting the sun, mostly in an outer region called the Kuiper belt.
“I don’t think we’re picking on Pluto,” Brown, a professor of planetary astronomy who helped provoke the demotion of Pluto, said in a telephone interview.
“It’s just the truth. It (Eris) just is more massive than Pluto. It’s just the way it is,” Brown said.
The findings were published in the journal Science. Scientists previously had figured that Eris’s diameter was bigger than Pluto’s but did not know about its mass. Like Pluto, Eris is unlikely to become a holiday destination. Both inhabit a remote and frigid region of the solar system. The new data indicated Eris likely is composed of ice and rock, very similar to Pluto. “It is covered in an almost perfectly uniform white frost. So it looks just like a white billiard ball out there,” Brown said.
Pluto and Eris both follow elliptical rather than circular orbits as they journey around the Sun. Eris’s orbit is highly elongated and takes 560 years. It ventures anywhere from 3.5 billion miles to 10 billion miles from Earth, Brown said.
Pluto, whose 250-year orbit on occasion brings it inside the orbit of the outermost planet Neptune, journeys as far as 5 billion miles from Earth, Brown said.
Eris, which has a small moon, has a diameter of 1,500 miles, just bigger than Pluto’s 1,400 miles. Brown said there are roughly 50 known objects in the solar system that can be classified as dwarf planets, including some close in size to Eris and Pluto. Brown said Pluto should be getting accustomed to second place.
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Monday, June 11, 2007
And found: 24 new wild species
A FROG with fluorescent purple markings and 12 kinds of dung beetles are among two dozen new species discovered in the remote plateaus of eastern Suriname, scientists said.
The expedition was sponsored by two mining companies hoping to excavate the area for bauxite, the raw material used to make aluminum, and it was unknown how the findings would affect their plans.
Scientists discovered the species during a 2005 expedition led by the US-based nonprofit Conservation International in rainforests and swamps about 130 km southeast of Paramaribo, the capital of the South American country, organisation spokesman Tom Cohen said.
Among the species found were the atelopus frog, which has distinctive purple markings; six types of fish; 12 dung beetles, and one ant species, he said. The scientists called for better conservation management in the unprotected, stateowned areas, where hunting and small-scale illegal mining is common.
The study was financed by Suriname Aluminum Company LLC and BHP Bniton Maatschappij Suriname. Suriname Aluminum, which has a government concession to explore gold in the area, will include the data in its environmental assessment study, said Haydi Berrenstein, a Conservation International ofIicial in Suriname, which borders Brazil, Guyana and French Guiana. About 80 per cent of Suriname is covered with dense rainforest.
Thousands of Brazilians and Surinamese are believed to work in illegal gold mining, creating mercury pollution that has threatened the health of Amerindians and Maroons in Suriname's interior.
This discovery is surprising because no previous theories of how the frogs arrived had predicted a single origin for Caribbean terrestrial frogs and because groups of close relatives rarely dominate the fauna of an entire continent or major geographic region," said biology Professor Blair Hedges, who directed the research.
The field work for the study required nearly three decades and some species included in the study are now believed extinct because of habitat degradation and possibly other causes, such as climate change.
For more details on Wild species visit www.halfvalue.com and www.halfvalue.co.uk
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The expedition was sponsored by two mining companies hoping to excavate the area for bauxite, the raw material used to make aluminum, and it was unknown how the findings would affect their plans.
Scientists discovered the species during a 2005 expedition led by the US-based nonprofit Conservation International in rainforests and swamps about 130 km southeast of Paramaribo, the capital of the South American country, organisation spokesman Tom Cohen said.
Among the species found were the atelopus frog, which has distinctive purple markings; six types of fish; 12 dung beetles, and one ant species, he said. The scientists called for better conservation management in the unprotected, stateowned areas, where hunting and small-scale illegal mining is common.
The study was financed by Suriname Aluminum Company LLC and BHP Bniton Maatschappij Suriname. Suriname Aluminum, which has a government concession to explore gold in the area, will include the data in its environmental assessment study, said Haydi Berrenstein, a Conservation International ofIicial in Suriname, which borders Brazil, Guyana and French Guiana. About 80 per cent of Suriname is covered with dense rainforest.
Thousands of Brazilians and Surinamese are believed to work in illegal gold mining, creating mercury pollution that has threatened the health of Amerindians and Maroons in Suriname's interior.
This discovery is surprising because no previous theories of how the frogs arrived had predicted a single origin for Caribbean terrestrial frogs and because groups of close relatives rarely dominate the fauna of an entire continent or major geographic region," said biology Professor Blair Hedges, who directed the research.
The field work for the study required nearly three decades and some species included in the study are now believed extinct because of habitat degradation and possibly other causes, such as climate change.
For more details on Wild species visit www.halfvalue.com and www.halfvalue.co.uk
For more information on books visit www.Lookbookstores.com
Thursday, June 7, 2007
The Global warming
Global warming is the increase in the average temperature of the Earth's near-surface air and oceans in recent decades and its projected continuation.
Global average air temperature near the Earth's surface rose 0.74 ± 0.18 °C during the past century. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concludes, "most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations," which leads to warming of the surface and lower atmosphere by increasing the greenhouse effect. Natural phenomena such as solar variation combined with volcanoes have probably had a small warming effect from pre-industrial times to 1950, but a small cooling effect since 1950.
These basic conclusions have been endorsed by at least 30 scientific societies and academies of science, including all of the national academies of science of the major industrialized countries. The American Association of Petroleum Geologists is the only scientific society that rejects these conclusions, and a few individual scientists also disagree with parts of them.
An increase in global temperatures can in turn cause other changes, including sea level rise, and changes in the amount and pattern of precipitation resulting in floods and drought. There may also be changes in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, though it is difficult to connect specific events to global warming. Other effects may include changes in agricultural yields, glacier retreat, reduced summer streamflows, species extinctions and increases in the ranges of disease vectors.
The term "global warming" is a specific example of the broader term climate change, which can also refer to global cooling. In common usage the term refers to recent warming and implies a human influence. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) uses the term "climate change" for human-caused change, and "climate variability" for other changes. The term "anthropogenic climate change" is sometimes used when focusing on human-induced changes. read more……
For more details on Global warming visit www.halfvalue.com and www.halfvalue.co.uk
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Global average air temperature near the Earth's surface rose 0.74 ± 0.18 °C during the past century. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concludes, "most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations," which leads to warming of the surface and lower atmosphere by increasing the greenhouse effect. Natural phenomena such as solar variation combined with volcanoes have probably had a small warming effect from pre-industrial times to 1950, but a small cooling effect since 1950.
These basic conclusions have been endorsed by at least 30 scientific societies and academies of science, including all of the national academies of science of the major industrialized countries. The American Association of Petroleum Geologists is the only scientific society that rejects these conclusions, and a few individual scientists also disagree with parts of them.
An increase in global temperatures can in turn cause other changes, including sea level rise, and changes in the amount and pattern of precipitation resulting in floods and drought. There may also be changes in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, though it is difficult to connect specific events to global warming. Other effects may include changes in agricultural yields, glacier retreat, reduced summer streamflows, species extinctions and increases in the ranges of disease vectors.
The term "global warming" is a specific example of the broader term climate change, which can also refer to global cooling. In common usage the term refers to recent warming and implies a human influence. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) uses the term "climate change" for human-caused change, and "climate variability" for other changes. The term "anthropogenic climate change" is sometimes used when focusing on human-induced changes. read more……
For more details on Global warming visit www.halfvalue.com and www.halfvalue.co.uk
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Monday, June 4, 2007
World Environment eco-savvy with these gadgets
Environment-friendly PC
THE Acer Aspire L310 desktop PC has a box capacity of three litres as opposed to the usual 10-litre desktop box CPU. It sports a sleek and portable form factor. Smarter component placement leads to better thermal management, resulting in efficient fan speed control for quiet operation (only 26 dB idle). In addition, it boasts a 3.5” SATA 3 Gb/s hard disk drive with up to 400 GB of storage space for speedy data access.
Sun-powered wristwatch
THIS Casio tough stainless steel men’s watch (MTP1227E-5AV) is solar-powered, charging in either sunlight or indoor light. The stainless steel watchcase is topped by a raised bezel with elapsed time markings. The brown dial face is complemented by silver triangular markers, thin silver hands and a digital day/date function.
(Approx $89.99)
EMW Reader
LONG-TERM exposure to high-powered electromagnetic fields may be hazardous to your health. The Ban-Yu 026 EMW Reader is specifically designed to read the magnitude of electromagnetic field radiation generated by power lines, computer monitors, TV sets, video cassette recorders and home appliances.
Pollution monitor
SQUIRREL, a mobile device being developed at the University of California and the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, can sample pollutants with its on-chip sensor. It measures carbon monoxide and ozone, but eventually it will be able to sample nitrogen oxide and sulphur dioxide in the air, as well as temperature, barometric pressure and humidity.
Using a Bluetooth wireless transmitter, it connects to the user’s cell phone. A software programme called Acorn allows the user to see the current pollution alerts through a screensaver on the cell phone’s display.
Solar phone
JAPANESE cell phone maker NTT DoCoMo is prototyping this hybrid mobile phone with solar panels. As this device is powered by the sun’s rays, you can put an end to travel chargers and emergency batteries.
For more details on eco-savvy gadgets visit www.halfvalue.com and www.halfvalue.co.uk
For more information on books visit www.Lookbookstores.com
THE Acer Aspire L310 desktop PC has a box capacity of three litres as opposed to the usual 10-litre desktop box CPU. It sports a sleek and portable form factor. Smarter component placement leads to better thermal management, resulting in efficient fan speed control for quiet operation (only 26 dB idle). In addition, it boasts a 3.5” SATA 3 Gb/s hard disk drive with up to 400 GB of storage space for speedy data access.
Sun-powered wristwatch
THIS Casio tough stainless steel men’s watch (MTP1227E-5AV) is solar-powered, charging in either sunlight or indoor light. The stainless steel watchcase is topped by a raised bezel with elapsed time markings. The brown dial face is complemented by silver triangular markers, thin silver hands and a digital day/date function.
(Approx $89.99)
EMW Reader
LONG-TERM exposure to high-powered electromagnetic fields may be hazardous to your health. The Ban-Yu 026 EMW Reader is specifically designed to read the magnitude of electromagnetic field radiation generated by power lines, computer monitors, TV sets, video cassette recorders and home appliances.
Pollution monitor
SQUIRREL, a mobile device being developed at the University of California and the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, can sample pollutants with its on-chip sensor. It measures carbon monoxide and ozone, but eventually it will be able to sample nitrogen oxide and sulphur dioxide in the air, as well as temperature, barometric pressure and humidity.
Using a Bluetooth wireless transmitter, it connects to the user’s cell phone. A software programme called Acorn allows the user to see the current pollution alerts through a screensaver on the cell phone’s display.
Solar phone
JAPANESE cell phone maker NTT DoCoMo is prototyping this hybrid mobile phone with solar panels. As this device is powered by the sun’s rays, you can put an end to travel chargers and emergency batteries.
For more details on eco-savvy gadgets visit www.halfvalue.com and www.halfvalue.co.uk
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